The Phoenix-like resurgence of the militant Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021 has shattered the smug assurances of political pundits, policymakers, and governments about its political demise. On February 29, 2020, representatives of the United States and the Taliban signed the landmark 'Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan' in Doha, Qatar. This peace deal paved the way for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan who were stationed there for two decades.

Soon after America withdrew its military personnel and civilians and ended its operations, the Taliban overthrew the government headed by President Mohammed Ashraf Ghani and assumed power. Initiated by the Trump administration, the peace accord was a bittersweet moment for the United States. American intervention in Afghanistan was ruinously expensive. By the time it ended, the United States had invested a trillion dollars in training and equipping Afghan military and security forces. Besides, it annually paid almost 80% of the Afghan national budget. As many as 2,488 Americans were killed, 20,722 were wounded, and thousands were affected by mental trauma.

The American military invaded Afghanistan in 2001, soon after the 9/11 terror attacks, and overthrew the Taliban government. After that, the United States installed Hamid Karzai as the President of Afghanistan, followed by Ashraf Ghani in 2014. America spent vast sums of money on state-building in Afghanistan for two decades. The goal was to help Afghanistan transition to democracy, build institutions, and strengthen civil society. These efforts were a colossal failure. The Taliban regrouped in neighbouring Pakistan, repeatedly launched terror attacks, and destabilised the Afghan government.

Successive Afghan administrations supported by the United States were mired in corruption and nepotism. Despite massive investments, Afghanistan did not metamorphose into a stable democracy. Sectarian violence, tribal loyalties, low levels of human development, a weak civil society, institutional infirmities, and the absence of an ethos of tolerance and inclusion all conspired to sabotage state-building efforts. Having reached a dead end, the United States withdrew in 2021.

Without a viable, secular alternative, it was compelled to negotiate with the Taliban and facilitate its ascension to office. America had come a full circle. The terrorist outfit it vanquished two decades earlier returned to power. American intervention and investments made little difference to the lives of ordinary Afghans. Afghanistan was a mortifying reminder of yet another botched attempt at nation-building in a foreign country. After similar debacles in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere, America had not learned its lessons.

The reinstatement of the Taliban has reignited old fears and grim prognostications. In its latest incarnation, can the Taliban unite Afghans and provide a stable government? Have years of wilderness mellowed its cadres? Can it ameliorate the lives of Afghans, or will it transport them to the Medieval Ages? Most important, now that the Taliban has assumed the reins of power, how should the world engage with it?

A new book, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left, published by Yale University Press this year, offers a nuanced analysis of these questions. Its author, Hassan Abbas, is a distinguished professor of international relations at the Near East South Asia Strategic Studies Center, National Defense University, in Washington, DC.

Abbas’s book tracks the vicissitudes of the Taliban through three phases: first, from its inception in 1994 until 2001, when the United States defeated it; second, from 2003 to 2018, a time when Taliban forces regrouped and strategised in Pakistan; and, third, from 2018 to the present, marking the advent of Taliban 3.0. Based on this rich, historically informed inquiry, Abbas maps the transition of the Taliban from an insurgent group to a political party at the helm of a government. In addition, he delineates the implications of the second coming of the Taliban for lay Afghans.

Abbas argues that the Taliban is not a monolith speaking in a single voice. It comprises five major groups: rigid hardliners, moderates, foot soldiers, organised criminal gangs, and ordinary villagers with tribal alliances. Contrary to popular perception, not all Afghans are hardcore champions of Taliban values. Some pose as Taliban cadres to camouflage their criminal activities, others go along for opportunistic reasons, yet others cave in, fearing reprisals. Die-hard zealots, mainly the old guard, constitute just a sliver of Taliban, albeit an influential one. They are at odds with Generation Z Taliban cadres, who tend to be less hostile to the West and have greater exposure to the world. Regardless, currently, the old, fanatical elements call the shots.

Abbas points out that the Taliban government does not have a coherent philosophy of governance. Its leaders have no use for democracy. The Taliban wishes to establish an Islamic emirate based on Islamic law, drawing heavily from the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. It claims to be implementing God’s rule in Afghanistan and sees itself as the agent of this heavenly mandate. A 312-page tome titled Al-Imarah Al-Islamiah wa Nithamaha, or The Islamic Emirate and its System, written by Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai, the head of the Afghan Supreme Court, serves as the constitution of the Taliban regime. It espouses a dogmatic, parochial interpretation of Islam, prioritises religious education, and thinks women are intellectually deficient and must be confined to their homes.

Also read: How Does the Present Taliban Regime in Afghanistan Differ From the Previous One?

Women and minorities under the Taliban regime

In tandem with this antediluvian worldview, the Taliban government discriminates against women. It has not given them any key position in government. Women have to wear the burqa ideally, or at least the hijab. They cannot travel long distances without being accompanied by a close male relative like a husband, father, or son and are forbidden from freely mixing with men in public.

Delineating the dismal circumstances of girls and women, Abbas makes two interesting points. First, he avers that though there is nothing in the Islamic canon against female education, the Taliban routinely mixes tribal norms with Islam and legitimises its retrograde policies. He does not explore why Islamic theologians, religious leaders, and Islamic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere have acquiesced in the Taliban’s distortion of their faith.

Second, Abbas underscores the ideological tensions between the rigid old guard and the moderates in the Taliban regime on the gender question. Unlike the slightly liberal moderates, the hardliners led by Mullah Hibatullah Akundzada, the Ameer ul-Momineen or the supreme leader of the Taliban, based in Kandahar in the south, champion a moth-eaten ideology implacably opposed to female education. The moderates prevailed for a while when the new Taliban government announced in May 2022 that women would be allowed to work and girls could continue schooling. This victory was short-lived. In a massive setback to women, the Taliban government quickly rescinded its decision.

Also read: ‘Will Raise Voice Against Injustice’: A Year After Taliban’s Return, Some Women Fight for Freedom

The maltreatment of religious minorities, mainly the Shia Hazaras, and the anti-Shia sectarianism in the countryside are the other major challenges the Taliban has to address. Abbas offers a chilling account of the genocide of Hazaras at the hands of the Taliban. Hazaras have endured unprecedented human rights violations, which the rest of the world seems to have completely ignored. Taliban cadres have forcibly dislocated the Hazaras, bombed their mosques and religious processions, alienated them from their lands, and denied them humanitarian aid. Hazara women have borne the brunt of Taliban brutalities.

According to Abbas, the Taliban detests the Hazaras as they are successful in business, progressive, and pro-democracy. It has wholly sidelined them from the government. The 33-member, all-men ‘caretaker’ cabinet appointed soon after the Taliban returned to power comprised 30 Pashtuns, two Tajiks, and one Uzbek. Women and Hazaras were excluded. To whitewash its egregious discrimination, the Taliban government has promised to help Hazaras, a claim with few takers.

In addition to the vexed question of women and minorities, Abbas argues that the Taliban government has to quell factionalism within its ranks and neutralise terror groups such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK). Internally, the Taliban is riven by internecine factions with divided loyalties and colliding visions for Afghanistan.

On crucial issues such as the abuse of women and minorities, the Taliban’s engagement with its neighbours, and its acceptance of Western culture, they differ vastly. While the younger, moderate groups are more accepting of modernity, the older, radical factions remain hidebound. Recurrent bouts of colonialism and foreign domination have made them paranoid about outside influences.

Factionalism

Abbas maintains that if managing the internal contradictions is arduous, containing terror groups is virtually impossible as they batten on cross-border patronage. Thus, the ISK – the progeny of the dreaded Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a jihadist Salafi movement aiming to establish an Islamic caliphate – is an implacable group responsible for 262 terrorist acts between August 2021 and August 2022. It views the Taliban leaders as traitors for entering into an agreement with the United States and has vowed to dislodge the government.

Similarly, the Pakistan-sponsored TTP has wreaked havoc in Afghanistan through ghastly terror attacks. Pakistan has propped up the TTP to strengthen its foothold in Afghanistan and to outsmart its old rival, India. Fearing increasing Indian influence on the Taliban, Pakistan wishes to destabilise the Afghan Taliban. An ardent advocate of a hardline approach, the TTP has actively collaborated with the ISK to create violence and political instability in Afghanistan.

Flailing to control these extremist groups and apprehensive of their combined strength, the Taliban government worries it could be overrun if seen as diluting its core ideology. Abbas posits that it is crucial to appreciate these agonising compulsions of the Taliban regime. Disregarding them will isolate the Taliban and diminish its capacity to contain militancy, hurtling Afghanistan into another prolonged period of chaos and violence.

Abbas appositely emphasises that these complications are exacerbated by a massive financial crisis that has pushed millions into desperate lives of immiseration. Twenty million Afghans are currently facing chronic food shortages. 3.2 million children suffered malnutrition in 2022. The Afghan economy has shrunk by 20% to 30% since 2021 after the American financial support ended. Before the second coming of the Taliban, the Ashraf Ghani administration was functioning with a foreign-funded annual budget of $ 8 billion. Now, bereft of foreign aid, the Afghan budget has shrunk to $2.6 billion with a projected deficit of $ 500 million.

Decades of chronic political instability, social cleavages, and foreign interference in domestic matters have engendered insuperable problems of governance. Abbas identifies the five areas of concern for the Taliban: the paucity of economic resources, eroding legitimacy and acceptance by its people, recognition by the international community, attracting qualified people, and accommodating rival factions in government. Though pressing, these needs are overshadowed by abysmal human development indices and the absence of meaningful initiatives for fostering human capabilities, a critical issue the author unfortunately overlooks.

Taliban's engagement with the world

Though doomed to die, Afghanistan seems determined to survive. Abbas reposes his faith in the long tradition of Sufism, tolerance, pluralism, and mysticism in Afghanistan and posits that its centuries-old culture will prevail. In the interim, he urges the global community to engage with the Taliban and continue to support its initiatives to rebuild the country.

For all its poverty, Afghanistan – about one-fifth the size of India with a population of 41 million people – is a staggeringly rich country in terms of its natural resources. It sits on an estimated three trillion-dollar mineral reserves in Mes Aynak copper mines. In addition, it has enormous deposits of lithium, iron, marble, talc, coal, chromite, cobalt, and gold. Several neighbouring countries, drawn by Afghanistan’s abundant natural resources and geostrategic location in Central Asia, have assisted the Taliban but stopped short of recognising its government. Some have misgivings about the Taliban’s ideology; others fear regional rivalries.

India and Pakistan wish to gain leverage against each other by cultivating the Taliban. Abbas states that since it supported the Taliban and Afghan refugees for decades, Pakistan feels entitled to treat Afghanistan as its fiefdom. Besides, it fears that the Taliban government might veer toward India, allowing the latter to use Afghanistan to foment trouble in Pakistan. India understands the geostrategic position of Afghanistan and wishes to promote stability there.

Under its ‘Neighborhood First’ policy, it has generously funded the construction of the $300 million Afghan-India Friendship dam and the $ 90 million Afghan parliament building. In addition, India provided humanitarian aid during the Covid-19 pandemic. India’s main concerns are security along its border and countering the influence of China and Pakistan in the region. The Taliban has responded favourably to India’s security concerns. Nevertheless, a trust deficit exists as India is uneasy about the strong nexus between Pakistan and the Taliban.

China has two main interests: Afghan economic resources and the desire to combat Uyghur militancy and separatism through the Wakhan Corridor, a strip of territory connecting Xinjiang to Afghanistan. Neighbouring Iran fears the anti-Shia militancy of the ISK and wishes to cultivate the Taliban for its security. Likewise, Russia is worried about regional instability in Central Asia and drug trafficking from Afghanistan. Regardless of their diverse motivations, all countries in the region are rooting for peace and security in Afghanistan. Cognisant of global expectations, the new regime is trying to reshape its anti-Western, anti-modern cadres into a responsible government.

Abbas exhorts the world community to quit pontificating and talking down to the Taliban. Times have changed, and so has Afghanistan. Mindful of the sensibilities of the younger generation, the Taliban is struggling to slough off its old ideological baggage. What it seriously needs is support, not sermons.

The Return of the Taliban is a masterful work of scholarship. Replete with facts and figures, rich in its historical account, and written in a riveting style, this book deserves serious attention.

Badrinath Rao is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. An attorney in Michigan, he is also the host and Executive Producer of 'Ideas and Insights', a public affairs TV show.

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